Herscher, Andrew

Andrew Herscher is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan. He surveyed wartime destruction in Kosovo for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, worked as a cultural heritage officer for the United Nations Mission in Kosovo, and co-founded the non-governmental organization Kosovo Cultural Heritage Project. He has also published in such journals as Assemblage, Future Anterior, Grey Room, Harvard Design Review, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Oxford Art Journal, and Theory and Event. He is currently working on two projects: the politics of historic preservation in post-Yugoslavia and the architecture of post-conflict reconstruction.

On Rorotoko:

Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017

It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016